TMCNet: Big ideas need time to develop

[November 08, 2011]

Big ideas need time to develop

Nov 08, 2011 (The Salina Journal - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- There are lots of great ideas, but turning one into a usable -- and sellable -- product can take years, if not decades.

That was part of the message from Tim Conver, chairman and CEO of AeroVironment, a California-based company known worldwide for its innovations.

Conver spoke Monday at Kansas State University at Salina as part of the college's annual Entrepreneurship Week, sponsored by the Students In Free Enterprise club.

AeroVironment was founded in 1971 to, as its name suggests, create innovative products "in the nexus of technology and the environment," Conver said. It booked achievements such as the Gossamer Albatross, the first human-powered aircraft to cross the English Channel; the Solar Challenger, which flew from Paris to England, and several other aircraft now at the Smithsonian Institution.


More recently, Conver said, the company has gotten involved in un-manned aircraft and devising ways to charge electric vehicles away from home.

The Unmanned Aerial Systems market already is crowded with vehicles that can fly at mid- to high altitudes and stay aloft for periods from a few hours to a day or so.

Staying up for a week So when AeroVironment decided to get into the industry, it developed the Global Observer, which is designed to loiter in the stratosphere for up to a week, functioning as a cheap, flexible spy satellite.

The company also developed a series of very small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, with flight times of a few minutes, intended for quick deployment by a squad of soldiers in the field.

The company's Wasp UAV weighs less than 1 pound, fits in a hard case about the size of a notebook and snaps together in a matter of minutes. It allows a squad of soldiers to "look over the next hill, around a corner in a city or over a wall before they kick in a door," Conver said.

Like a sniper shotgun One of the company's newest models, the Switchblade, comes in a launch tube smaller than many you can find at fireworks stands and carries "a few hundred grams" of explosives. A soldier on the ground can launch it, designate a target using the hand-held controller and the Switchblade's video feed and "fly it right into a car window." "It's like a sniper shotgun," Conver said. "It causes very little collateral damage." Conver also talked briefly about his company's work on developing a network of electric vehicle charging stations along the West Coast, prompting a question from the audience about the benefits of quick-change batteries instead of chargers.

Conver said AeroVironment had experimented with quick-change batteries and found they were comparable to battery chargers in many ways.

However, he said, building up an infrastructure for changing batteries instead of charging them would have been much more expensive, as it would require multiple battery packs per car.

China makes it work Additionally, the changed-out batteries would still need to be recharged, "and all of the batteries would need to be the same for it to work. At the time, Ford and GM couldn't even agree on the shape of a charging plug, much less a battery configuration." However, he added that he'd recently seen such a system in operation on city bus fleets in China. In that system, a bus pulls into a central garage and a robot replaces the battery and puts the old one into a charging station in a matter of minutes.

-- Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by email at mstrand@salina.com.

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